Ageing (dis)gracefully!
Archive for July, 2007
At Last, Somewhere To Sit!
Jul 24th
The new sofa arrived today – pictured below (albeit not in their final positions). They are the same colour by the way, the light was on for the first pic and not for the second, hence the difference.
Dining Table & Sideboard!
Jul 22nd
If ever proof was needed that I am growing old then this post is it! ….now brace yourself, this is excitement like no other! …..
Last week we took delivery of our new dining table and sideboard! We got them via Leigh, who works for a local furniture company and was able to do us a good deal. Cheers mate!
We are really pleased with them. They are in the same style as the tv cabinet we got from the same place a few weeks ago aswell. Now all we need is the sofa so we can actually sit in comfort …and the good news there is that it’s being delivered on Tuesday! 
DNS Issues Resolved!
Jul 20th
This blog is now working from www.danlawrence.co.uk once again!
As mentioned previously, I am stuck with a dynamic IP address with Sky Broadband, but found a great site to bridge the gap between domain and dynamic IP – www.dyndns.org. Costs ?12 a year for a custom DNS solution for one domain name, but its well worth it. I was paying ?3 a month for my static IP with my previous ISP.
An added benefit is that I can now run my mail server again. Bye bye webmail! …… I won’t be missing you at all!
Server Back Online!
Jul 18th
After 3 weeks of inactivity my home server is now up and running. The delay has mainly been because there was no ADSL connection here, so no point in having it on!
Getting ADSL was complicated by the fact that we brought our telephone number from the old flat to this address. This meant that the number was showing at the old address for almost a week after it transferred and ultimately meant I couldn’t order an ADSL connection! Once switched over the order was placed with Sky and finally connected last Friday (the 13th !! ..a lucky day for me!).
The connection appears to be stable and reliable, I am getting a good 8mb out of it. Its max is supposed to be 16mb and in a few weeks I will pursue this with sky as it seems we are capped at 8mb, but its no big deal at the moment. The nice surprise was the 768k of upload, an increase in half a meg from my old connection! Nice!
The downside of running with Sky is they only give dynamic IP addresses, which in simple terms means that it isn’t as easy for me to host this blog or any of the other services my home server runs. At the moment, www.danlawrence.co.uk is forwarded to binaryslave.homedns.org, which in turn is attached to my dynamic IP. I am already looking at custom DNS options though and hope tp have that solution in place by this weekend.
I had initially placed the server out in the garage so that its noise and heat didn’t bother me anymore. Nice idea but there was a bit of a snag …..I had to use a wireless connection to do this and as the garage is quite far from the access point it had major problems with the internet connection dropping for it. It was good enough for me to remote desktop onto it and use it in general that way, but the download speeds were pretty piss poor @ 50ishk! ..so i’ve moved it back in. I’ll look at relocating it in the future …perhaps i’ll get a wireless signal booster or something.
Anyway – it’s good to be back online! 
Moved In!
Jul 18th
We moved in on the 29th of June as intended. Got the call to say we had completed on the house @ 10:21am and we made our way around to pick up the keys from the estate agent. We then came to the house on our own for a brief look and to be able to savour the moment together before the madness began.
All in all it was a crazy day, 3 van loads and 3 car loads. Took 6 of us about 3 hours to move everything.
Totally worth it though – we now own our own house I like being able to say that now
